Top 10 Science Breakthroughs That Destroyed Entire Industries

Ice Making / Ice Cutting
Upon walking into almost any kitchen, there’s one appliance you’ll be sure to spot: the refrigerator. Today, we plug them in and magically, they keep everything cold. But at one time the only way to keep the temperature of food and drink down was with good old fashioned ice. The entire ice trade industry thrived around the production, collection, and even cutting of ice and existed long before electric cold storage. With the invention of Freon, the need for a big ole block of ice fell to the wayside, leaving many an ice worker looking for a new gig.

Punch Cards
Ever wonder where the saying “punch a clock” comes from? It originates from a time when employees would place a small piece of cardstock paper into a machine when they started and ended their shifts. Punch cards went far beyond keeping the time however. For more than 200 years they were used in a variety of ways to both store information, and provide instructions to mechanical devices. IBM even became a leader in punch-card tech. But with the introduction of magnetic storage, which eventually gave us the floppy disk, the old punch card world ceased to exist. Hopefully they recycled all those old cards.

Water Transportation
In this day and age, it’s fairly easy to overlook the convenience of having water in our homes. Whether it’s to wash our clothes or dishes, fill our bathtubs, or even flush the toilet, running water is something of a given. Yet for many years, people transported water by hand for many of these same reasons. Even those who lived near a river or other fresh water would still have to find manual means to get the water to the people. So the next time you fill your glass with water from a tap, count yourself lucky.

Linotyping
The act of “typesetting” used to refer to the act of taking actual metal characters and lining them up in reverse so they could be stamped with ink, and then transferring the text to a printed medium. Linotype was one of the most popular forms of typesetting and was employed in newspapers, magazines and posters. Operators would use rudimentary keyboards to produce the sets of characters called matrices which would then be used to produce the print. With the introduction of photo and digital typesetting/printing, the companies who produced the linotype and similar machines had to move on with the times.

Film Development / Film Creation
For more than a century, film was used as the primary means by which to capture a photograph, as well as movies. The images were acquired through a combination of the special material on the film and exposure to light. It would then be “developed” in a “darkroom” to produce the final version. Digital photography took awhile to come up to par, but when it did, analog stock took a serious hit. All of the major players in the photographic film space took a downward turn when digital took over. Even longtime vendor Kodak saw their 100+ year business have to strategically change to meet with the times.

Telegraphy
Ever heard of Morse Code? The famous dots and dashes signaling system was heavily adopted by telegraph operators back in 1865. Telegraphy itself had been around much longer and served as a means of transmitting a message from one location to another using codes the receiver could interpret. Often used by industry or the military, it really took off when the price of sending telegrams became affordable. However, once telephones, and eventually the internet, came into existence, the need for telegrams faded. This also included Morse Code which although rarely needed today is still actively used by amateur radio operators and some forms of the military.

Gas & Fire Based Lighting
When was the last time you looked outside and saw someone lighting up your local street lamps as the sun went down? As long as humankind has known about fire, we’ve been using it to provide some form of artificial light. It started with torches, but as various forms of combustible gas were discovered, illumination started coming in the form of lamps. Whether it was to read and write in the dark, or drive a horse down a street, gas lighting was everywhere. With the introduction of electricity, and the incandescent lightbulb, almost all of that industry flickered out. Kerosene, or similar based lamps are used for outdoor enthusiasts but much of that is now done by LED lights.

Leech Collecting
Let’s face it, take a look back in the history books and you’ll find all kinds of questionable things that passed for medicine. In fact, did you know there was a study known as phrenology that diagnosed conditions based on the mere shape of your head? At one time, there was even an entire industry around the collection and selling of leeches. These worms have a natural ability to extract blood from the creature they latch onto. Given how bloodletting was quite common at the time, leeches were an easy way to accomplish it. Thankfully, these methods, and the careers that went with them, died with modern medicine.

Human Computing
Ever met someone who has an uncanny ability to do ridiculous amounts of math? Had they lived in the pre-computer era, they might have had quite a successful career. Long before the modern technology era, “human computers” were just that: people used to compute an answer. Large groups of individuals would often be given highly complex and tedious calculations to solve for various purposes. Many would operate in tandem to verify each other’s work. By the 19th century, women were often employed and even in demand for such work. But as transistors and other semiconductors became more readily available, machines quickly supplanted their creators in being able to calculate the fastest.

The Carriage Industry
There’s no denying it. Once cars became the norm, anything and everything having to do with the horse-drawn carriage almost dropped off the planet. For centuries people had used horses and other animals as a means of traveling across distances. Various forms of carriage were attached to the animals to allow for the transport of additional passengers and cargo. So when the internal combustion engine was invented, followed by Ford’s release of the Model T, a tidal shift came to the world. Sure, people still ride horses and carriages for fun, but the mass production of such equipment and its use fizzled greatly with this invention.